Los Olivos High Schooler Helps Raise Nearly $20K for Families Impacted by L.A. Fires
Dunn School Student and Pasadena Friend Create ‘Teens 4 L.A.’ Fundraiser
In what has been a seemingly endless fire season, firefighters in Southern California have been battling huge blazes since the beginning of the month. Although the major fires in Los Angeles County are nearing 100 percent containment after the weekend rains, thousands of people have been displaced from their homes.
Aliyah Redding, a high school senior at the private Dunn School in Los Olivos, could not stand by and watch. As someone who used to live in the Palisades — where the fire is 94 percent contained as of Monday morning — Redding thought about his old high school, his Eagle Scout camp, and his friend’s houses being decimated.
“The entire community I grew up in, over the course of 24 hours, started to burn down,” he recounted. He felt the need to do something about it.
He and his friend in Pasadena, Kyle Godwin, partnered with Another Awesome Day, a nonprofit focusing on teen mental health, to create a digital fundraiser, “Teens 4 L.A.” So far, they’ve raised nearly $20,000 to provide relief for families impacted by the fires — including $10,000 in just the first three days.
“Like others, I felt this immediate tremendous trauma or shock, but I wanted to reframe that and be more solution-oriented to help the families who lost their homes,” Redding said.
To mobilize resources and fundraise in a serious way, Redding realized he should go through a nonprofit. Family friends helped connect him to Another Awesome Day, and his mission and message “spoke to their organization,” he said.
Additionally, thanks to the nonprofit’s decentralized Web3 platform, they’ve been able to leverage global currencies and accept donations through crypto. That means people from all over the world can support impacted families in minutes.
“We’re seeing the effects of climate change across the world — L.A. is burning up, but the East Coast is practically a snowball right now — and I think it’s important to be proactive and have technologies to deploy resources quickly,” he added.
Redding said they are using the money to facilitate physical donations and organize supply runs, delivering food and disaster relief items to distribution centers and first responder stations. After going through the COVID-19 pandemic, he recognized the need for this kind of immediate relief, including PPE and clean clothes.
Godwin is the boots-on-the-ground of the operation, and has been buying supplies and other necessities and delivering them to local organizations to help Altadena families who lost their homes in the Eaton Fire.
“Our focus also includes supporting the mental health of young people affected, directly or indirectly, by the fires sweeping across Los Angeles,” Redding said, by ensuring that kids have access to mental wellness resources.
Now, the teens are looping in people from their communities. At Dunn, they are accepting donations from families and staff within the school community.
Eventually, they want to expand, and they’ve already started to reach out to student groups at UCLA and other schools to create a wider support system.
“Us kids, we have already seen the effects of disasters like COVID and the effects of climate change, which played a part in the wildfires in L.A.,” Redding said. “People want to help out and are just looking for ways to do that.”
Donate to Teens 4 L.A. here.
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